Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [335]
Toussaint told Sabès and Gimont that they had never had any bad treatment from him, and that they had seen how well he treated all his blanc prisoners. It was hard for me not to look at Guiaou when Toussaint spoke so, though I held my eyes straight forward, and I saw from the tight jaws of the two blanc officers that they were having trouble too. Sabès and Gimont had seen a lot of unarmed blancs and women and children get butchered, at Savane Valembrun and Petite Rivière and probably a few other places too, even if Toussaint did not like such things to happen when he was there himself to see them. But Toussaint was still talking, saying again how he had done all he could do to stop this war from happening, and how all the war and trouble was really the fault of the Captain-General Leclerc.
Then Sabès could not keep his tongue still any longer, and he said to Toussaint all in a rush that none of the trouble would ever have happened if Toussaint had not disregarded the authority of Leclerc, and that he and Gimont had suffered a lot, and seen a lot of very bad things happen to other blancs along their way, which was as much as saying Toussaint lied. We heard a little whisper go around the men at that, like a small breath of wind on a still hot day, but Toussaint raised his eyes and the whisper stopped. I thought that Sabès must be a brave man, or maybe a little crazy, to speak as he had spoken then, though it was truth.
But Toussaint tried to hide his anger. He talked still more, telling how he had been named Governor-General of Saint Domingue by Bonaparte, chief of the soldiers in France, and that Leclerc had appeared to attack him the way a pirate appears on the ocean. Gimont was a captain of a French boat, and Toussaint finished by saying to him, “If you command a ship of state and if, without giving you any notice, another officer comes to replace you by jumping on the foredeck with a crew twice the size of your own, can you be blamed for trying to defend yourself on the afterdeck?”
Sabès and Gimont did not say anything more after that. Toussaint had already told them that they were going to be sent down to General Boudet at Port-au-Prince, to carry the letters Toussaint had written, and they would not have wanted to make him change this idea. Toussaint had horses given to them, and they rode out of Chassérieux toward the coast, with a small guard, while Toussaint went inside his tent, and the ring of people who had been listening broke apart.
After all that had happened since the French ships came, most of our people were thinking that any blanc was an enemy, so I did not know what they thought about all Toussaint had said that morning. But I, Riau, because I had copied them, I knew the words of the letter Sabès and Gimont were carrying to Boudet, and they were smooth as glass— The rights of man, which shelter them from all arrest, give me no right to consider them prisoners. I desire that you should act in the same way with regard to my nephew and aide-de-camp Chancy, who is at Port-au-Prince.
However well Toussaint liked his sister’s son Chancy, the person he would most want to trade for was his own son, Saint-Jean, but while Boudet held Chancy in Port-au-Prince, Leclerc himself kept Saint-Jean hostage at Le Cap, and it was Leclerc that Toussaint had spent the morning blaming, in place of all the French blanc soldiers. I did not know what he might have to trade to Leclerc for Saint-Jean, so his intention was very hard to see. These were troublesome thoughts, and maybe others in the camp were having them too. The men had rested a little now, enough to wonder what they were going to have to do next, and no one spoke about it, but all could feel a spirit of confusion in the air.
But on the afternoon of that same day, four riders